Daring to Whisper
by Astrid Goes For A Spin
Summary: Leck said that Bellamew imbued her art with some terrible truth; Ashen in her secret embroidery did the same. Perhaps it is because they are not artists their daughters are such liars. A study in six parts as Hava and Bitterblue struggle toward truth, together.
1. Chapter 1

**My first real Seven Kingdoms story! (I wish the other one unwritten, really. Especially since** ** _Bitterblue_** **came out.)**

 **For those of you who know me as a HTTYD writer, Kristin Cashore's Seven Kingdoms trilogy (or Graceling Realms) is one of my absolute favorite series, and something I rarely dare write fanfiction for.**

 **Kudos to the people who get the reference (to** ** _Bitterblue_** **) that is the title, and I hope this story makes you feel something. :)**

* * *

Spring comes slowly to Bitterblue's great courtyard. Rain drips from the eves in a less dramatic way than it does in the winter, although the magnificent fish still flop and leap along the tiles. Bitterblue stands before the Bellamew of her mother, and wonders why the tinge of warmth in the air seems to soften the sculpture some.

In the bitter Monsean winter, the sculpture of Ashen seemed to scream more loudly. Her silent cries echoed through the shrubbery and haunted Bitterblue all the way back to her blue sitting room.

Leck wrote in his last journal that Bellamew sculpted an Ashen who hated him. Bitterblue can feel that hate as she reaches out, so gently, to touch the slick stone. Hava's heart broke when Fox _put her hands all over_ the Bellamews and tried to take the little Hava away, but Bitterblue knows this touch is completely different, and Bellamew's daughter will not mind.

Ashen could not hate Leck in her right mind. Perhaps it is her hate that is the mountain lion in her, allowed to ravage only when Leck brings her to the very brink. But Bitterblue has a feeling that the mountain lion is the protective part of Ashen, savage enough to save Bitterblue from the most savage man in all seven kingdoms.

With flowers blooming around her, the scent of peonies and roses at the edge of her consciousness, Bitterblue tilts her head up to look into her mother's stone face and sees it in less terrible pain than before.

Perhaps it is because Bitterblue is in less pain herself now than the moment last year she recognized her mother as the tragic figure on the pedestal.


	2. Chapter 2

The very existence of Hava should turn Bitterblue's stomach.

Normal children are repulsed, she thinks, when they find they have half-siblings. In order to create that life, there was terrible sin on the part of one of their parents against the other. She and her Lienid family should be outraged on behalf of Ashen.

Bitterblue cannot separate this reality from the reality that her father was Leck, and that both Hava's and her mothers were raped. In Leck's case, matrimony barely mattered.

It is selfish of her, but Bitterblue is grateful that someone else in the world knows and shares her painful legacy, in a way. While Hava will never have to rule a kingdom, she cannot escape the simple deceit that is her Grace.

Fire is almost as close as Hava. Bitterblue senses that Brigan, too, would understand. But their fathers ruined a kingdom and countless people through neglect and carelessness, not by pure selfish madness. The effects of their fathers were political, not emotional.

But as much respect as Bitterblue has for them, she suspects the emotional massacre Leck left behind in just a few minds is far worse than the state of the Dells. But either way, they are old and have finished their grieving, if one can ever finish such a thing.

Bitterblue almost feels, on the bad days, as though her grieving begins anew every time she learns something that she knows is the truth.

She knew it in her blood and bones from the moment when she discovered Hava's identity: there is nothing half about Hava being her sister.


	3. Chapter 3

It does not occur to Bitterblue to ask Hava more about how Hava's Grace works until Hava has been living in the sculpture room for several months.

It is a secret shame of Bitterblue's that, despite how much she relies upon and trusts and even loves Hava, Hava's Grace still frightens her.

She can't help but understand that Hava's Grace is a derivative of Leck's. It is a lie every time she flickers into something else, a trick to make other people's eyes and minds believe she is a sculpture, a gargoyle, a tree. _A pretender._ It is so similar to what Leck did with words.

Except that Hava is timid and loyal and kind, and has not a greedy or mad bone in her body.

Bitterblue has not forgotten that Hava defended her twice, during both attacks on her person. But she is a Monsean, and it is her duty to serve her queen. Countless others have fought on her behalf.

Unforgettable to Bitterblue is how Hava cradled her head in her lap – so tender and awkward and careful – afterward.

It is a surprise to Bitterblue to discover, bit by bit, that Hava's Grace is not the weapon Bitterblue thought it was. She'd always imagined that Hava chose what disguise to use; that in the way Katsa chooses between a stranglehold or a bone-breaking blow, in the way Saf chooses between sweet dreams and nightmares, Hava could choose whatever she wanted to be – cart, canvas, sculpture, painting, beautiful.

The reality is more frightening.

"It sort of seizes me, Lady Queen," Hava explains quietly one night. Bitterblue could not sleep, and wandered to where she knew Hava would be. "I have only some control over it. If I get the feeling I need to hide, I've often already done it without even knowing. I learned the trick to doing it on purpose, Lady Queen, when I was a child, but only sometimes am I able to choose what to hide as. Most of the time it goes by so quickly my Grace has already chosen something convenient."

"Like a piece of canvas when you're at the docks, or a sculpture in the art gallery," Bitterblue muses.

"Yes, Lady Queen."

"And I suppose you couldn't practice very well, could you? Not since your Grace is disguise, and the only people who would know your disguise was working are the ones you were hiding from."

"No, Lady Queen. It was confusing to me as a child. I was very lucky my mother understood it from the start. I can't see my disguised reflection, you see, Lady Queen. I thought everyone around me was mad for a time."

"I thought you hid in the art gallery when you were a child," Bitterblue says, confused and aching to know more.

"I did, but my mother came to visit. And…after, I made my way around the city and the countryside. It was then I eventually learned how it worked for myself."

Bitterblue takes Hava's hand, her chest crushed in sympathy. If only she'd known. She, ten years old, unable to leave her mother's rooms. Bleeding animals, bleeding serving girls. _It was very frightening._ Hava, unable to know anyone, instructed to hide if any person entered her haven. So much freer, but so threatened anyway. _She taught me to hide from King Leck, always._ Leck's daughters, closeted and hidden away from him in his own castle. So much power that one man had had over them. Over everyone.

"So the night I first came to the sculpture gallery, you didn't choose to change your eye color or the shape of your nose?" _Hide the red eye. The wrong eye. His eye._

"No, Lady Queen. I just knew I had to be human, and I was afraid to show my real face. Truth gives other people power over you, you know, Lady Queen."

"I know, Hava."

They sit quietly while Bitterblue puzzles over this. A Grace that seizes on the fear of its Graceling and whips her out of control. It is almost like a mental ailment, the effects seen in everyone around her.

"If you were to decide to hide, right now, would you be able to, say, disguise yourself as a sculpture or gargoyle of your own choice?"

Hava flickers, but doesn't change. "It depends on what's around me, Lady Queen. I don't know what I'm disguised as if I've done it unconsciously, Lady Queen. But sometimes I'm able to decide for myself."

"That must be a relief," Bitterblue decides.

"Yes, Lady Queen."

"Hava?"

"Yes, Lady Queen?"

"Please don't call me Lady Queen anymore. I know you want to, but I'd like it very much if you would call me Bitterblue."


	4. Chapter 4

Giddon is gone from the Monsean court for most of the spring. Bitterblue finds herself half-crazy, freed by his absence from her own _experiment_. Her experiment of only telling the truth to him. This has kept her in check, she realizes.

Normal politics has nothing on the mess Leck left behind of the Monsean court.

Although he insists he is no longer a lord, Bitterblue sees his responsibility for the people that will always be his in the lines of his face and the calluses on his hands. A new lord lives on his burned-out land, is building a new manor in the place of Giddon's castle, and Giddon visits to make sure his beloved villagers are rebuilding and getting along well enough as they begin again.

When he returns, stinking of horses and sweat and road dirt, he is heavy and sad but more at peace than he was when he left.

It is humid and brutally hot, and Bitterblue has escaped her stuffy tower for relief and found none (she tried opening the windows, but the wind coming in and the perception of emptiness makes her sick and dizzy). Giddon finds her on the edge of the fountain in her great courtyard, fanning herself slowly and futilely and trying to soak up some of the cool from the stone.

"Lady Queen," he greets her. He sits beside her, and seems to be barely bothered by the heat. The Middluns are warmer than her mountains, she reckons. "How are you?"

With this simple question, all thoughts of long skirts and long sleeves and the sweat beading on her brow vanish, for Giddon is the person she tells the truth to, and the weather is truthfully the least of her problems.

"Overwhelmed," she responds slowly. "Clerks in my tower have breakdowns at least twice a week. I found another of Thiel and Runnemood's men in my new ministry, and I got word from the Dells that Saf so provoked some faction so much they tried to kill him. I have a headache all the time, never seem to get enough sleep, have doubts about the replacements in my government, and miss my friends."

By the end of this, blood has risen in Bitterblue's cheeks. Giddon's eyebrows are in his hairline. "I…see."

"At least you're here now," Bitterblue smiles. "And Teddy and Bren and Tilda and Hava have been great helps."

"I'm glad to hear that, Lady Queen."

He doesn't seem frightened or bothered by these truths. In fact, Giddon begins to question her in his gentle, methodical way, and within minutes they are on their way back to her tower, refreshed and ready to tackle her assistant minister of education.

Sometimes the truth needs to be withheld, but not often, Bitterblue decides. No matter how painful, the truth is necessary for healing.

Even for her.

Perhaps revealing a little more truth of herself would help solve her problems. Giddon was full of sympathy and advice. There is a difference, when speaking with friends, between telling a truth and exposing a weakness.

As she strokes Froggatt's hair as he sobs in the lower offices, Bitterblue makes herself a resolution.

She will tell at least one truth more a day than politics would advise. Not just to friends and those that she loves and she trusts, but to her advisers and her judges and people working in her castles and the criminals in her jails.

She will be the antithesis to the liar king that came before her, even in her personal, emotional tangle of a life.

When Helda asks her that evening how her day has been, Bitterblue breathes through an empty comment about how she despises sweating in silk and remarks, "Difficult. Heartbreaking. But I won't have it any other way."


	5. Chapter 5

Two years after Hava returned to Bitterblue City and participated in Danzhol's plan to throw Bitterblue out a window, Bitterblue visits the art gallery for the first time in several months.

She and Hava have spent endless time together, of course, but when the art gallery ceased to yield answers to mysteries and became instead rooms full of painful evidence of Leck's crimes to Bitterblue, she stopped coming.

Hava is not at home. Bitterblue knows where she is; Bitterblue sent her into the city in the early afternoon to tail an informant.

It is past midnight, though, hours after the job should have ended, and no one has heard from her. Twitchy and nervous, Bitterblue leaves her bed and walks along the dark, moonless corridors to the art gallery. Perhaps as being among her mother's sculptures makes Hava feel closer to her mother, being in Hava's sanctuary will make Bitterblue feel closer to Hava.

Somehow, in the years since Hava moved in, the art gallery has become less frightening. As Bitterblue pushes through the rooms of tapestries and paintings, she swallows her fear and pain.

The sculpture room, the furthest from her point of entry, is different now. The sculptures, once menacing and circling the room like birds of prey, have been arranged tastefully in a whole new way, leaving a corner free.

Bitterblue's heart hurts when she beholds this corner. A mattress with a mess of blankets and several trunks (of clothes, like hers? Weapons, like Katsa's? Books, like Teddy's?) litter the floor; a clever configuration of rods and beautiful curtains close the space off from the rest of the room, simultaneously brightening and darkening it. There is a simple metal tub for bathing, although Bitterblue can't imagine where she gets the water up here.

Trembling, Bitterblue sinks to the floor beside this bed. One of her dearest friends, her _sister_ – living as if on the streets. She wonders if being surrounded by Bellamew's sculptures make Hava feel she doesn't deserve better.

Bitterblue doesn't know how much time passes before something flickers to her right; with a little gasp, she jumps and turns.

Hava is soaking wet, covered in mud, and clearly exhausted.

"Your informant is dead," she says with a sigh. "I'm sorry, Lady Queen. I followed him for several hours. When I was on my way back, he marked me, and jumped into the river to get away. I searched for him, but everyone I've spoken to says he barely knew how to swim."

"Do you think I care about that now?" Bitterblue exclaims, jumping to her feet. "Look at this!"

Hava, in the slow act of squeezing out wet hair and dragging her washbasin away from her valuables, stops to look. Bitterblue reads her shame in the flickering, the droop of her head and her hands. "I know it isn't fitting, Lady Queen. But I feel most at home with the sculptures."

"You've moved them," Bitterblue accuses her. She sweeps an arm at the emptiness around Hava's little nest. Then, restraining herself, she helps Hava, who is shivering, undo her coat and boots. "I understand, Hava. My mother's embroidery frightened me too."

"You put her embroidery away," Hava whispers, shaking harder than ever now. "I don't know that I could ever do that."

"I couldn't stand being so close to it," Bitterblue continues. "But I get it down often. I understand that their art is all we have left of them, Hava. But it frightened me. It's all right if some of the sculptures frighten you."

Hava starts to cry, and Bitterblue understands. Guilt – guilt that she is afraid and wary of these living, transforming sculptures, sculptures that scream to and pity their watchers, their maker.

"It's all right," she breathes to Hava, clutching her. Hava resists weakly, mumbling something about getting the Lady Queen's nightgown wet, and Bitterblue snaps, "What have I told you about that, Hava? I'm just Bitterblue to you."

"Bitterblue, Bitterblue," Hava sobs wildly. "I can't leave the sculpture room. I don't deserve to. I'm not normal. My Grace is like his, it's bad. I'm _his_ daughter."

"I'm his daughter too," Bitterblue says fiercely, pushing Hava back, away from her, holding her by the shoulders and shaking her until Hava looks into her face. "But I'm also Ashen's. And my mother didn't sleep on a mattress on the floor. Your mother had a room, Hava. Bellamew wouldn't have wanted this. Let me find you somewhere to go."

"I can't, I can't," Hava whimpers. "I'm scared."

"He's dead. We're undoing everything we can, Hava. You don't need to be scared anymore. Don't you know that's what big sisters are for? Chasing away the nightmares. I'll protect you from what's left of Leck, and I don't even need a Grace to do it."


	6. Chapter 6

In the end, Hava sleeps on the luscious, extravagant sofa in Bitterblue's sitting room. It takes her a while to gather the nerve. Often, in the beginning, Bitterblue wakes to find Hava's sofa empty, she having deserted to return to the sculpture room in the night.

But eventually, the balance of nights tip, and Bitterblue wakes to find Hava still there. Her clothes and trunks find places in Bitterblue's sleeping room. Her brightly patterned curtains end up tucked away, and she and Bitterblue move the little sculpture of Hava turning into a bird into a corner of the sitting room, beside Bitterblue's crown.

One early morning several months later, Bitterblue wakes in tears. She can't remember what her dream was about, other than bones and blood and her father's voice. She wishes fiercely that Saf weren't a mountain range away and that he could send her into a dream of fearlessness before she has to begin her day.

Hava is stroking her hair. She hadn't noticed her enter the room, but Hava's flighty, gentle touch was probably what was able to rouse her from her nightmare. Bitterblue can see through her open door that Hava's blankets on the couch are disturbed, that Helda's door is closed.

"It goes both ways, Bitterblue," Hava whispers to her. "Sometimes little sisters take care of the big ones."

Some residue of the nightmare, or perhaps just the stripping away of daytime bravado, makes Bitterblue terribly unwilling to be left alone again. She understands in a flash why Hava so desired the company of her mother's sculptures. If it had been Saf who woke her, or even Giddon or Po, she would have eked out a single word: _stay_.

But there is something that she and Hava have that she and others do not, and she does not have to ask.

Hava, clumsily and timidly, pushes back the covers on the untouched side of Bitterblue's humongous bed. She resumes her stroking of Bitterblue's hair as she settles awkwardly in, frightened still.

"I love you, Hava," Bitterblue says, very calmly, very quietly. She eases closer to her sister in the bed and allows her head to drop to Hava's shoulder. Hava's arm flutters anxiously for a moment, and she flickers into a pillow before she wraps that arm around Bitterblue and holds her tight.

Bitterblue's eyes are closed and her breathing is smoothening when Hava kisses her on the top of the head, the way Po or Katsa might. "I love you, Bitterblue," Hava finally whispers back.

The sun peeks through the beautiful mullioned windows of Bitterblue's sleeping room as Bitterblue finally is able to return to peaceful sleep.

Truer words than those of love, she reflects dreamily, have never ever been spoken.


End file.
